Increasing our top reward from $50,000 to $100,000. Last year we introduced a $50,000 reward for the persistent compromise of a Chromebook in guest mode. Since we introduced the $50,000 reward, we haven’t had a successful submission. That said, great research deserves great awards, so we’re putting up a standing six-figure sum, available all year round with no quotas and no maximum reward pool.

In other technical words, 100,000USD is to be given to whoever can hack its operating system Chromium OS that is updated almost daily from the finest and most talented software engineers.

Sounds like a good deal, yeah? Actually, not. It is worth noting that Google set extremely hard rules and the chance of winning the amount is close to 0. Yes, it is possible to hack a Chromebook but your chances are close to 0. Here is more information about the reward:

We have a standing $100,000 reward for participants that can compromise a Chromebook or Chromebox with device persistence in guest mode (i.e. guest to guest persistence with interim reboot, delivered via a web page).

You need to find a bug in Chromium OS's sandboxing secure mechanism that has been evolving for four years. Sandboxing ensures that each Chrome Extension (they call them apps) is run in a restricted environment and is sandboxed (quarantined, imprisoned). In other words, you need to create a Google Extension and from that extension, you need to locate a bug in Chromium OS, if it does exist I assume.

Once you find this invisible bug, you create an extension that would take advantage of the bug so that it would escalade access and escape the sandbox. All that, you need to in Guest mode.

Once you escape the sandbox, you need to find a second bug that would allow you to tamper with the system and corrupt its files. That is, first, you need to find a third bug that would allow you to access the developer's mode from the guest mode.

One you gain access to the developer's mode from the guest mode, you need a way to break the administrator account inside of the "Linux-based" operating system from a non-privileged account.

Hold on, we're not done yet. It needs to be persistent. That means, once you edit the operating system files, you need to tamper secure boot scripts as well, which double checks the operating system files on boot to see if they were tampered with.

The hack, if found, is probably worth more than USD10,000,000 in the black market, the odds of getting a Chromebook hacked from the "guest" mode is about the same odds of winning the lottery. If you're looking for some quick cash, you might as well go buy a lottery ticket rather than go get a Chromebook and attempt the hacking.

The USD100,000 is just a tiny small amount from Google's pocket, but most importantly, it is a guarantee from Google that their Chromebook is safe, as long as no one wins the bounty, Google would smile and double the amount whenever they want.